


the one who left their name behind

by verdenal



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 21:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: [post-s1] Tak is looking for Quell, Rei is looking for Tak, and Quell is waiting for both of them.





	the one who left their name behind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [millepertuis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/gifts).



> I hope you like this!! I went pretty heavy on the dream sequence/unreality component because what is sci-fi without some sort of wild philosophizing., hopefully the character dynamics still come through!

**o1.**

By the end of it, he doesn’t know anything anymore. Which is what being a ghost must be like; he moves in the world but his body no longer has any meaning attached to it. Meaning is another way of saying corporeality. Takeshi Kovacs has never been a man who spent much time on philosophy. Quell had been the thinker. He misses her with everything he has left, everything that he hasn’t already given to her.

He moves through the CTAC ships like the ghost he is. He remembers being one of them, and when they see the set of his shoulders and his blank, forward-facing stare, they move on without another thought.

If they knew Rei had backed Quell up they would have destroyed her without hesitation. But he would have heard—someone in this time would have known what happened. Quell is shrouded in silence because they have to assume that she’s dead. If they had a body they’d have paraded it around—and the thought makes him sick—but Quell taught them that a body has nothing to do with death, or with life.

Do they have her in a glass case somewhere, all of her lights gone still and dark? How could they manage a feat like that? They’d never dare to leave her somewhere near computers, where she could find a way in. If Quell had been left in a machine somewhere there wouldn’t be stacks anymore. Takeshi would be dead, and so would Rei, and so would Quell.

He’s alive for her. Because of her.

(Which _her_ is something fluid, if it’s more Quell or more Rei. Always both.)

The first time he sees Quell after he finds out the truth, they hold each other for a long hour, and after Tak can’t remember if their hearts were beating or not. His was, or he was remembering the sensation of blood pumping through his body. He wonders where she is, and as if in response Quell cups his cheeks. Her hands are warm, or his face his, or their breath mingling.

Or nothing at all. She’s real to him and he to himself, and maybe he to her, but then neither of them is real outside of this. Two ghosts in the machine.

When her thumbs go through his eyes Tak registers only the warm trickle of blood down his cheeks before he jolts awake. That isn’t love; Quell would never do that. She’s telling him how not to look for her. He goes back to his maps.

Sometimes when she comes to him his hands are already red with his own blood, and she folds her fingers carefully over his. She only talks in his memories, but now that he knows that she’s alive—that her stack is out there, he can feel words catch in his throat when she comes to him. There are a thousand questions but in the end he decides none of them matter. He will find her, whatever it takes. He has infinite lifetimes sprawled out before him, and his heart in her hands.

**o2.**

Rei knows what a person can survive, and she can survive a fall from orbit. What survives—the stack, the sleeve, both—is immaterial. It’s still her. Still Rei. But Tak is nowhere to be found, and Rei alone is not who she wants to be anymore. 

He’s gone after Quell, obviously, so Rei will go too. If it feels childish to trail behind her big brother she doesn’t admit it to herself. Rei is the one who decides what is childish, now. No one around her knows who she is, or where she’s going, or why. She could be anyone she wants.

So she becomes someone small again, little Rei-chan following her brother across the universe. She knows well enough what he’s doing to stay just a half-step behind him. She doesn’t have any idea where Quellcrist’s stack is, either. If she did maybe she would leave little notes for Tak, hints that even he won’t see for what they are.

Quell finds her, instead.

Rei opens her eyes to find herself back in the shuttle. She’s at the controls. Quell is standing far behind her. Rei knows it’s her before she turns around. She remembers Quell’s energy like a brand on her skin., or crackling down the wires of her stack.

“Why are you here?”

“I suppose you wanted to talk to me.”

Rei looks at her then. She looks exactly like she did on the day she died. Except, of course, that she didn’t die, and she is here now to remind Rei of that. 

Rei hates her so much she wants to claw her own skin off.

“Are we going to relive this precious memory? Is that what you do with my brother?”

She’s expecting some sort of reaction from Quell, but instead she answers in the same flat voice.

“Yes. But I don’t think that’s what we’re going to do. Unless, of course, you’d like to.”

Rei blinks. “You’re real.” Or she believes that she’s real, which is sadder.

Quell blinks back. “I’m as real as I’ve ever been. Just like you.”

“Does my brother know? Do you talk to him, or do you let him think he’s having some sort of hallucination?”

“I don’t know what this is. I won’t lie to him about this.”

“You’ve had years to figure it out. I thought you were a genius.”

“There hasn’t been,” Quell starts. Rei tilts her head like a bird of prey, careful of the back of her neck as she always is.

“Your brother is the only person I could have gone to.”

“And he doesn’t even know if it’s you that he’s seeing.”

“That’s not what Tak needs. He needs something else.”

Reileen feels pushed against the edges of her own body and Quell is standing there with the same placid expression on her face. That’s how Rei knows she’s not real; because she can remember the range and depth of Quell’s expressiveness even now.

“And you’re the judge of that? You still have to control everything? This is all your fault! Because you thought you knew what was best for everyone!”

“And you don’t?” Her voice is still calm and even, though she’s stepped closer to Rei. “Didn’t you cause all of this because you thought you knew what was best? For Tak? For everyone?”

Rei holds her ground. “I saved him. I saved myself. I saved you.”

“Did you?”

Quell is standing right in front of her now, breathing her air with her. Rei can’t tell if either of them is actually breathing. Stacks don’t breath. The sleeves do, but Rei isn’t sure that she’s in a sleeve anymore. Quell can’t be, because Rei took care of that a long time ago. 

She draws her spine up straight like steel. Quell is gone; Quell is a fucking stack in a box somewhere Rei can’t even begin to imagine. She’s inert plastic, but she’s standing here as real as Rei herself. More real, even. Too real for a ghost. Rei is sick of being scared of ghosts.

Quell falls and bleeds like a real person, too.

**o3.**

Whatever else Quellcrist is, she is still alive. Consciousness in the stack is something she’d struggled with in the early days, but by the end she could pull herself out of the deep freeze of stack storage. She’d never been able to teach anyone else though, even Tak. 

Quell looks down at her hands. They look exactly the same.

_Nobody here but us chickens_ , she laughs to herself, and settles in.

;

Tak dreams of her, the first time he sleeps in his new sleeve. Quell feels it in her whole body like a gentle tug. As though Tak thinking of her has somehow dragged her back to some sort of corporeality. From there, it’s easy. All she has to do is plant one foot firmly in her own mind, and give in.

At first she can only watch him watch her, but then something ripples in his mind and she can touch him. Really touch him, not watch him wrap his arms around the smoke of memory. He knows she’s alive. She’s no longer a ghost.

;

Reileen kills her forty-six times before Quells finally decides a new course of action is needed. The forty-seventh time Reileen pulls her into her mind (Quell can’t wait to tell her that Reileen summons her out of some strange desperate longing) Quell grabs the knife in midair

“Enough, Reileen.”

It startles her enough to make her step back. Quell gives her space.

“This is your fault, not mine,” she says, resuming their conversation from the first meeting. “You chose this future.”

“I chose having a future over not having one,” Rei hisses.

“And how has that worked out for you, I wonder? Are you happy? Has the world become better for all of your choices?”

Rei swallows harshly, and Quellcrist watches her throat bob.

“I hate you,” she bites out. “And when we find you I’m going to kill you for real.”

“Would Tak let you?”

Rei stills.

“Has he forgiven you? Does he even know that you’re still alive?”

Silence is answer enough.

Then: “I was the one who told him your stack was still out there. He’ll forgive me anything.”

That was an answer Quell wasn’t expecting. 

“Ask him yourself, before you find me, Reileen.” Her name sits so heavy in Quell’s mouth; neither of them are comfortable with it.

“Try to imagine a different future than this.”

And the Quell is gone, back to her own space, where she swallows down the speech she would have given. That’s all she has ever needed to say to them anyways, at the core of it. Try to imagine a different future than this. 

Quell looks down at her hands and wonders if they will ever become flesh again. Tak will find her sooner rather than later, with Reileen on his heels, and then she can begin to answer to question of what she is in this place, of what she will be when she is no longer in this place.

A different future than this, and a better one. She waits, and imagines what will come of this, three ghosts, screaming towards the same center; three dreamers walking in the same dream; drawn together into the making of something real.


End file.
